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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26759338">She Knew What To Do</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/frostryn/pseuds/frostryn'>frostryn</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>The People's Tomb Fic Jam Prompts [3]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Corona and Judith are mentioned, Discord: The People's Tomb (Locked Tomb Trilogy), During Canon, Gen, Kind of a character study, Missing Scene, The People's Tomb Fic Jam: Scream, gtn end retelling from Cam's pov sort of, the major character death this is pal and gideon aka just canon stuff</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-10-01</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-01</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 13:20:15</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,924</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26759338</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/frostryn/pseuds/frostryn</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Camilla did not have to look at the sick room—to see the blood, bone, and viscera that showered the hallway like a fresh coat of paint—to know that her necromancer was dead. She was awestruck that her heart hadn’t ceased to beat the moment his had. A world without her necromancer was a world which had spun off its axis and dimmed, like the light of Dominicus had been snuffed out.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Camilla Hect &amp; Palamedes Sextus</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>The People's Tomb Fic Jam Prompts [3]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1939300</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>38</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>She Knew What To Do</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>So this fic is for the People's Tomb Discord Fandom Jam prompt "Scream" and I dedicate it to all the Cam stans in the server, sorry if I'm about to make your really really sad.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Camilla Hect did not scream. She did not have to look at the sick room—to see the blood, bone, and viscera that showered the hallway like a fresh coat of paint—to know that her necromancer was dead. She had heard the explosion and had wanted to cry out, but she couldn’t. Every part of her that could express the grief that dissected her heart and strangled it’s ventricles—that spread through her body like a disease and struck her with an unbelievably physical pain—had died with him. Camilla was awestruck that her heart hadn’t ceased to beat the moment his had. A world without her necromancer was a world which had spun off its axis and dimmed, like the light of Dominicus had been snuffed out. She had been at his side nearly all of her life, long before she had passed the examination to become the cavalier primary, and she <em> never </em> lost sight of him. And yet she had lost sight of him then and it pained her to know that it had been a deliberate, calculated move on his part. The Warden made his choice and he must have known that the entirety of her would crumble without his orders—without the sound of his voice when he laughed, the softness in those lambent grey eyes when they lingered on her, the warmth of his body beside hers when they slept at night in that four poster necromancer’s bed because he refused to let her stay in that diminutive cot. It was impossible and horrifying that she hadn’t even been there when the person she had dedicated her life to had died. But she didn’t have time to admire what a wreck her shattered heart had become in his absence. She drew her knives and she fought with every iota of anger and heartache and fear that devoured her soul. Her weapons were a brutal form of art and Cytherea’s body a canvas, and with every strike she painted the bloody picture of her grief.<br/>
<br/>
Camilla fought the offending lyctor harder and more desperately than she’d ever fought in her life. Every strike was a poised deathblow, she punched and kicked and sliced and struck with the wrath of the Emperor Undying. No, with the wrath of Camilla Hect, which was potent and feral and overflowing. Gideon and Harrowhark and the raging awful construct blurred away into the background until they were no more. The entirety of the Canaan house faded, walls and floor crumbling to dust; all Camilla could see was the person responsible for the Warden’s untimely demise. Cytherea the First took every blow ably which only fueled Camilla’s wrath. She fought dirty, like a brawler, strike after ruthless strike. She fought like her life and the life of her necromancer were on the line—because they were.<br/>
<br/>
</p><p>**</p><p><br/>
Camilla didn’t scream when the enormous bone shank ripped through the musculature of her shoulder, but she did when Gideon pulled her free of it. She nearly bit through her tongue as the other cavalier dragged her into cover. Blood erupted from the open wound and her arm hung uselessly, and she knew it would never fight for her the way she needed it to again, not without a flesh magician to repair the shredded threads of muscle, nerve, tendon anew. Unfortunately for her, the canaan house was remarkably short on necromancers. Gideon went to give her a once over and Camilla could see the gears turning in the other cavalier’s mind as she prepared to return to battle. She grabbed Gideon’s sleeve, desperately. Gideon had been there when the Warden had died. Camilla should have been there. Could she have saved him?<br/>
<br/>
“He say anything?” To keep her voice level as she spoke was a herculean task, she was holding the floodgates of her mind shut.<br/>
<br/>
Gideon hesitated, chewing her lower lip. “He said to tell you that he loved you.”<br/>
<br/>
“What? No, he didn’t.” Palamedes was not one to go out with a frivolous declaration of love, it was out of character. Besides, she knew that already.<br/>
<br/>
“Okay, no, sorry. He said—he said you knew what to do?” </p><p>“I do.” Camilla said, and she let herself lie in the rubble pile, indulging herself in a moment of  relief. She knew what to do, they had planned for this just days after the deaths of the Fourth. The Warden was ceaselessly thorough. </p><p>She could see it in her mind’s eye because she’d replayed the conversation in her head every single night since. Palamedes remembered everything he ever saw, everything he ever heard with an expert precision, but Camilla’s memory had always been irritatingly fallible. He had told her that he was on the brink of something, some kind of breakthrough, that he was very close to comprehending the true method of lyctorhood. The original conclusion he had arrived at, that his ascension would require her sacrifice, had been abandoned immediately as barbaric and incorrect. He had fallen into that familiar academic transe, scribbling on flimsy that plastered every surface in their quarters and pouring over necromantic texts, mumbling to himself. She had to coerce him into meals, practically dragging him away from his studies. </p><p>That night, he sat at the table across from her, taking notes in the margin of a book. She had begun polishing, sharpening, and admiring every weapon in her arsenal for nicks in what had become a nightly ritual ever since the Fifth had perished so violently.<br/>
<br/>
“If I die—” He began.<br/>
<br/>
“You won’t,” Said Camilla. She glanced up from her rapier, hands stilling on the dirty polishing cloth.<br/>
<br/>
“ <em> If </em> I die,” Palamedes repeated, his eyes imploring her to play the devil’s advocate. “We need to have a plan. We have already discussed every possibility. My death may be improbable, but after what happened to the Fourth we ought to be prepared.”<br/>
<br/>
Resigned, Camilla placed her weapon on the table and sat back, arms folded. “What provisions would you make, Warden?”<br/>
<br/>
</p><p>The Warden took his glasses off his beak-like nose and scrubbed at the lenses with the sleeve of his robe. She had learned that it was a fidget, a habitual task he busied himself in when pensive, nervous, or angry. “In the event of my death, I would deliberately fix my soul to my body—my bones, if necessary—and so long as you retrieved some part of me we’d be golden.”<br/>
<br/>
“How will I know you’re still attached?” Camilla asked, tone practical.<br/>
<br/>
“You’d need only have Nonagesimus confirm. The two of you working in tandem could very easily bring me back.” Palamedes slid the glasses back on his face. Camilla thought it foolish that he trusted the Ninth so wholeheartedly, but she did not question him.<br/>
<br/>
“I would hardly constitute full on resurrection as easy, Warden.”<br/>
<br/>
At that, he smirked, leaning back in his chair. “It may be more achievable than we once thought.”<br/>
<br/>
“What happens if I’m the one who dies?”<br/>
<br/>
“I won’t let anything happen to you.” He said, nearly before she’d finished speaking, tone fervent. To that, she smiled, and she did not question him.<br/>
<br/>
**<br/>
<br/>
As Camilla watched the Ninth cavalier die, heart run through on an iron spike, she understood everything. What Palamedes had rejected as unconscionable had been an inevitability, though he believed that there was another way. Just that morning he had told her he was closer than he’d ever been to uncovering the method. Every fiber of her being had faith in her necromancer, but as Harrowhark Nonagesimus screamed that horrible, throat tearing scream, Camilla wondered if it would have been better if they’d followed the predetermined path. When the Reverend Daughter found her footing, talking incoherently to herself, or perhaps to a person no one else could see, she was nearly vibrating with power. Moments ago she’d been three quarters dead, drained from the exertion of fighting a foe who ought to have wiped them all out of existence by now. She was a lyctor, a feat of necromantic ingenuity, a necromancer and a cavalier bound together for eternity, a soul burning inside the body it’s existence had always revolved around. Camilla could have been that for Palamedes, she would have died for him without hesitation if he had asked. He would have called her foolish for it, said her life meant more to him than lyctorhood ever had, but she was struggling to reconcile being a Hand without a Warden. She was his cavalier and everything she did, she did for him. Every breath she took, every action, footstep, every slice of her sword, the whole of her existence had been dedicated to Palamedes Sextus, her necromancer, her best friend who she had loved with every beat of her broken heart. </p><p>Cytherea the First fell quickly thanks in combination to the thrust of Nav’s sword wielded by Harrowhark and Palamede’s pre-death ingenuity. It must have been easy to speed along the lyctor’s blood cancer since it was the same ailment that had plagued Dulcinea, which Palamedes had studied tirelessly ever since he was a child. He rendered her moribund as a parting gift to them right before burning himself out in what he thought would be the death-blow. Camilla watched as Harrowhark pulled the body of Gideon Nav from the iron spikes that had been her intentional undoing. Harrowhark had wept, lying beside the body until finally her own went still. When she finally mustered the energy to stand up, Camilla checked Harrowhark’s pulse before staggering back towards the sickroom. She knew what to do.<br/>
<br/>
It had been immeasurably difficult to make it up the stairs and down the hall, stumbling over bones and debris and slipping on fresh blood, especially when she had a single working arm and was pallid from blood loss. It was entirely possible that more than half the intravenous fluid painting the tiles was her own. </p><p>Camilla knew even before she reached the doorway that there wouldn’t be much of her necromancer left. He had blown himself up, had made himself the perfect case study of radical thanergetic fission. There were bare footprints through his cold, congealing blood. She did not allow herself to think, she simply dropped to her knees in the red puddle and searched through it with her bare hands for something, anything left.<br/>
<br/>
It was something of a perverse exhumation, to dig through the detritus of the sick room, through shreds of clothes, intestines, brain, and other organs he had left splattered across the hallway. He had been deconstructed, rendered down to individual parts with those parts rendered to atoms. There was nothing as significant as a severed limb or intact bone, so she settled for fragments. She searched methodically, carefully, wading through every inch of the hallway and  sickroom and piling bits of his remains into her pocket. It took over an hour, but eventually she had a pile of mismatched bone chips. Some were still coated with skin and fat, but she could sort that out later. Her trousers were soaked through and stiff with his blood, it was splattered across her face and up to her elbows. She could taste it on her lips. Her gut twisted in intermingled terror and relief as she cradled what was left of her necromancer in her arms.<br/>
<br/>
Not long after that, the shuttles landed and she and the rest of the survivors, save for Harrowhark, had been invited to leave and join the Blood of Eden. Camilla went simply because she knew she couldn’t face her house ever again.<br/>
<br/>
**<br/>
<br/>
</p><p>In the end, Camilla had recovered 96 usable pieces of Palamede’s skull. She had spent painstaking hours gluing the fragments back together with keratin, and with her iron resolve and laser focus, she did not think about what was going to happen next. She took it one step at a time, one piece of skull carefully placed beside another like the world’s worst jigsaw puzzle. Although she was reeling from the tragedy of Canaan, recovering from the wound in her shoulder which had required minor surgery and seventeen stitches, Camilla hardly slept until her task was finished. Her arm hung uselessly across her chest in a sling and it was all the more difficult to piece him back together one-handed.</p><p>When she was finally finished, she stared in bleary, blood-shot awe at the reassembled piece of skull that lay before her. It was a piece of his supraorbital bone and the broken curve of his parietal, attached to his protruding zygomatic cheekbone, down to a shard of his maxilla. She had extensive knowledge of the human anatomy but she wouldn’t have needed it in order to reassemble him for he had been immortalized in her memory. She could see exactly where the angles of the bone influenced the shape of his face and in doing so, she could nearly imagine him whole and entire right there in front of her. When she held that piece of him cradled in her hands, she trembled, only then allowing the doubt to seep in. If this part of him wasn’t enough, she would have to go back. The Cohort must have taken the rest of him, though, and she knew she would fight through as many soldiers as she had to in order to recover what they’d found. But she was skipping a step, and she knew what to do. She would find Harrowhark Nonagesimus and solicit her assistance, she would tell her if all her efforts had been for naught.<br/>
<br/>
**<br/>
<br/>
Coronabeth was driving the shuttle; it had been a few hours since they had departed from that backwater planet, leaving Harrowhark the First alone on its surface. The inside of the cramped structure was dim, stuffed full of crates and supplies. On the floor, Judith Dueteros slept, lying on her side on the corrugated metal floor and facing the wall. The door to the cockpit was closed, but Camilla knew that eventually Corona would call back to switch off driving. They took turns, keeping Dueteros out lest she concoct some half-baked plan to get them all killed by returning to the Cohort. The shuttle was in disrepair, with a sputtering engine and something rattling in the walls, but it would survive for them a little longer. The recyc air whirred from a vent above and the entire craft faintly vibrated, a muffled beeping from the cockpit. Camilla sat on a wooden crate with her back against the wall, knees drawn up to her chest and all the noise faded away.<br/>
<br/>
In her hand, she cradled the construct Harrowhark had sculpted out of what remained of Palamedes’ skull. It was an articulated wrist, proximal carpal bones, a distal row, phalanges: a hand that had been formed without a second thought. It was smaller than his, more uniform, with shorter fingers. If it had truly been his, there would have been evidence of the fractured pointer finger he’d sustained at age fourteen. But it was his, created from his osseous material and with his spirit attached to it. The relief that flooded through her when he was confirmed to be attached to the scraps of bone Camilla recovered had rocked her body like a tidal wave. It was a carefully contained explosion of joy, a terrific weight lifted off her shoulders. It had been eight terrifying and awful months living without knowing if her necromancer’s soul was still there with her. Sitting there, with the hand splayed out delicately over her palm, she wondered how on earth she had managed. It was such a profound and inexorable grief that had devoured her heart with no hope for reprieve and yet here she was, in the shuttle, finally at ease.<br/>
<br/>
Hesitantly, Camilla lifted the hand and intertwined it’s phalanges with hers, gripping it tight as if to will the rest of him into existence. When she reached up to brush a strand of her hair out of her eyes, her hand came away wet. It was only then that she realized she was crying and she didn’t know how to stop. A sob wracked her body, all at once flooded with relief in the knowledge that he was still there with her and the horrible grief of his death she had never allowed herself to linger on. Her thoughts from eight months ago repeated themselves in a scream of anguish. She suddenly felt that it had been her fault, somehow, that she could have saved him if she’d only had the chance. All of that carefully concealed, repressed emotion hit her like a ton of bricks and left her breathless, trembling, clutching the skeleton hand to her chest. It had worked; he was in there, but she was so afraid to have hope. Her entire body shook and she couldn’t hear a single sound above the roar of her beating heart. She cried until the tears stopped coming and then she convulsed in violent, tearless sobs. The entire time she was silent so as not to awaken Judith or get the attention of Coronabeth, but it almost hurt more not to vocalize the pain in her heart.<br/>
<br/>
This confirmation of the Warden’s continued existence brought with it a fresh new fear: she didn’t know what to do. They had never planned after this step, and so she was left to desperately wait for a sign, a movement, a flicker of her necromancer within the bone construct she held tightly. She waited for him to tell her what to do.<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
</p><p><br/>
<br/>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Thanks for reading, feel free to talk to me at <a href="https://frostryn.tumblr.com/">frostryn</a> on tumblr!</p></blockquote></div></div>
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